\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{ulem}
\usepackage[a5paper]{geometry}
\usepackage{xifthen}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\author{Mark Norrish}
% put some nebulous accreditation of EB
\title{On the use of multiclass Gaussian processes for machine learning as applied to classification problems}
\begin{document}

%\maketitle
\parskip 2.4pt

\ifthenelse{\isempty{a}} % give isempty no arg to give the entire thing
{
\tableofcontents

}
{}
\include{background}

\end{document}